


Travelers Without Map Or Compass

by Butterfly



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-16
Updated: 2007-07-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 22:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butterfly/pseuds/Butterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With the Doctor, everything is a bit of an adventure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Travelers Without Map Or Compass

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the osk_ficathon.

"…even if their natural color _is_ purple, I doubt that particular shade was healthy," Rose said, leaning back against the railing of the control platform. She took a bite of her fuzzy neon-green pear-shaped fruit and chewed. It tasted of mango with just a _hint_ of peppermint. She considered that for a moment and then swallowed, trying to remember just what it was called.

She turned her attention back to the Doctor, who was coatless and on his hands and knees in front of the main console, head half-hidden behind one of the supports. It was, she thought, a rather good view. She'd always appreciated a nice bum. She grinned to herself and carried on her half-conversation.

"I don't think he liked what you said about his… brother." Well, the Doctor had said that 'brother' had just been a rough translation of the TARDIS, that it was more like brother-cousin-aunt. Sometimes, it really did feel like he was making it up as he went along.

The lights flickered and she could hear him muttering to himself in a language that wasn't being translated. So, he was swearing, then.

"Did you hit your head?" Her voice was nothing but sweet concern.

There was a brief silence and then the Doctor pulled away slightly, peeking at her from over his shoulder. It was, quite possibly, the most adorable thing she'd ever seen – he had a vaguely cross and suspicious look in his eyes, his hair was ruffled up high, and his lips were pursed in confusion.

She waved her fingers at him cheerily. "I only ask because the _last_ time you hit your head, you very nearly started a civil war."

"A war? It wouldn't have been a _war_," he protested immediately, his features settling into indignation. "A scuffle, maybe, or a bit of a tussle. A fracas if things got particularly heated. But certainly not a war."

Rose raised her eyebrows at him, taking another sweet taste of her mango-pear-peppermint thing. It was harder under her teeth than either a mango or a pear would be, though. Sort of like an apple, really.

"Definitely a war," she said. "The way she looked at you… ooo, you were lucky that time. We could've been banished from there, too."

"Maybe it was nearly an incident?" he offered, sitting down on the grating and stretching his feet out in front of him. He was holding something in his hands – it looked a bit like a wrench, if they came in green with little tubes all off the sides. Rose shook her head solemnly.

"Battle," she said. "That's as far down as I'll go."

"_Minor_ battle." Lithely, he jumped to his feet, placing the TARDIS part down on the bench near Rose. "Are you done with that? It's hungry, manly work, repairing things is. I'm sweating, literally sweating. You should feel the back of my neck."

Instead of answering, Rose took a bite out of the fruit, feeling a tiny bit of juice slid down her chin. He quieted down and watched her, with that odd soft look that he got. He'd had it before, she'd seen it sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, but he wasn't as good at hiding it anymore. It was nice, though. Something about it just made her feel all warm inside.

She held the fruit out toward him and he plucked it from her hand, nibbling at the place where she'd left off. Blimey, he _could_ eat.

"So, whatcha fixing?" Rose asked, sitting down on the seat and staring at the part he'd pulled from the console. "Is it broken? Do you need to replace it? _Can_ you replace it?"

"In reverse order – I can, I do, it is, and my flux capacitor."

"You're full of it." She couldn't help her disbelieving smile. "You nicked that from Back to the Future."

"Ha!" He tossed the fruit back to her and raised a finger up in emphasis. "More like the other way 'round, I'd say."

"You inspired Back to the Future?"

"Well, I would have thought that was obvious. It was quite a while ago, but I was the original prototype for Doc Brown," he said. He was giving her that 'I am an attention-seeking puppy' look of his, the one that meant he wanted nothing more than to be petted and praised for how clever and beautiful he was. "The character was _based_ off of me. Shame they Americanized it, though. I like your accents better than the American ones. A bit better. Not that I'm knocking American accents, mind, because I'm not. It's just that I like yours a bit better."

"So, you're saying that, at some point, you looked… all fluffy white hair and such," she said, filtering away that bit about liking her accent to tease him with later. "You'll have to show me a photo."

"Impossible," he said. "Don't have any. You'll have to suffer with not knowing."

"You don't have any."

"Besides, I looked older then anyway."

"But you _are_ older now."

He was starting to look a little uncomfortable and she was reminded of how Mum had slapped him, a year or two ago, back when it was the old him and her mum had thought he was forty or forty-five. That age gap was rearing up in the back of his mind, then. He worried about it sometimes, she knew.

"So, your flux capacitor is utterly useless and broken now, but you've got a spare," she said, and he looked so relieved that she decided she wouldn't ask him about the photo thing again. She didn't really need to see anyway, because no matter what he'd looked like, it would never make a difference. He was the Doctor; he'd have still been the Doctor even if he _had_ ended up with two heads. It didn't matter.

"In Storage C – mechanical storage," he said. "I was rather hoping that you'd go fetch it for me while I prepare the systems to accept it."

"Course I can. Does it look just like that one?"

"It'll look less broken." And he grinned at her, wide and happy.

"Check on that, less broken it is. Now – where _is_ Storage C?" she asked.

"Well, start off like you're going to the main archive-"

"With all the lights and space things?" A few weeks ago, not long after Mickey had stayed behind in that parallel world, the Doctor had taken her to that room and he'd held her hand under the starry, shifting ceiling there and showed her where his planet used to be, and where the war was fought, and he'd talked quietly and softly about the fall of Arcadia, where it had all ended. He'd told her not to miss Mickey, the way he'd told her not to miss Jack, so many months ago. He'd said that they were each exactly where they needed to be and… so was she. She'd tightened her hand around his and then he'd swept her up in his arms and just held her until all her tears were gone.

"-that's the one. Go that way, but take a left instead of the second right. Then, go down the stairs, take another left and it should be the second door on the right. Simple."

And it was, compared to some of the directions he'd given her in the past.

"Be back in a flash," she said, taking another long look at the flux capacitor so that she'd recognize it in the storage room.

"Missing you already," he said, offhandedly. Likely he'd pretend he hadn't said it at all if she asked him about it and, anyway, he'd already turned back towards the console, flicking a switch up.

It was always a bit of an adventure, wandering about the corridors of the TARDIS, whether she was with the Doctor or alone. She'd discovered so many fascinating and odd places in here, just by ducking her head into rooms she passed on the way.

By the time she reached Storage C, her fruit was thoroughly eaten and she'd made a mental note to go back and check out the room just under the stairs when she had a moment – a model-ship building room, from the looks of it, and that wasn't a hobby she'd ever imagined for the Doctor.

But she was a woman on a mission, so she headed into the storage room.

It was a big room, probably bigger than the main control room, though it was hard to tell, because every shelf and narrow row was near to overflowing with every kind of engineering bit and bob imaginable – and some that she didn't think she could have thought up in a thousand years' time.

She headed down the first row, looking at the shelves at first – they were all neatly labeled but, unfortunately, all the labels were that beautiful, circular script that the Doctor used on his notes and that the TARDIS never bothered to translate. Instead of trying to read the labels, she concentrated on the parts, searching for a section that looked more… _Time Lord_ than the rest.

She recognized some of technology from what they'd run into in their travels, but the vast majority of this room was, well, alien. The Doctor had seen so much in the nine-hundred years before they'd met. She'd never have enough time to catch up.

Didn't mean she couldn't give it her best.

In the end, the right row wasn't all that hard to find, and the part he wanted was in plain view, if down on the lower shelf. The Doctor was right when he'd said it would look 'less broken' – it was shinier and the tubes on it seemed a bit longer than what she recalled of the other one.

She gathered it up and then headed back, with a last wistful look into the storage room. This was another place she'd need to spend a day or two with the Doctor in, just exploring, with him explaining it all.

When she was nearly back to the control room, she grinned as the strains of Elvis Presley bled out into the hallway. She could hear the Doctor, too, singing along. Maybe, after this, they'd try for New York again.

"-_I'd have all the things these lucky charms can bring, if you'd give me just one_-" he broke off when she came into the room and bounded over to her, slipping a hand around her waist to spin her about to the music for a moment before grabbing the new capacitor out of her hand and rushing back over to the console. She giggled, twirling a bit on her own and feeling like she was in her fifties skirt and not trousers and trainers.

"Can I help?" she asked, leaning against the console while he stuck his head back down underneath.

"Not yet, but I'll need you when we restart the systems," he said, doing something with his hands in there that seemed to require quite a bit of force. "I could do it on my own, I suppose, but with you right here, there's no point."

"You're really going to need to restart the TARDIS once this bit is in?" Rose asked. The Doctor murmured an affirmative, still turning something she couldn't see. "So, that means that the flux capacitor's a really important bit."

"Well, its bursts of energy stabilize us in space and time so… _fairly_ important, yeah."

"Wait a minute – you're saying that it's the reason we landed in London last trip… but that means… it's been broken for ages. It was useless back when I first got on board and we landed in Cardiff instead of Naples." He sort of grunted, which she took as a yes. "Why wait until now to fix it?"

Ah, _that_ got a reaction.

"I did fix it," he protested loudly. "After Cardiff, after the Slitheen, after Queen Victoria – I fixed it, all of those times. Every wrong landing that we had ended up with me messing about with it and every time I was _sure_ that I'd dealt with the problem."

"And all along, you had the spare, but you didn't want to admit you couldn't fix the broken one?"

"That doesn't sound like me," he said, seriously. Rose burst out laughing. After a moment, he gave in and joined her. "Maybe it sounds a bit like me. Only a bit. It's just that… we did cover all this, back at school. Unfortunately, I may have slept through that particular class. I used to be quite fond of napping."

"Not the best student, then?"

"Hopeless. I kept ignoring the assigned coursework and asking about subjects that we either weren't covering _yet_, hadn't ever planned to cover, or that didn't actually exist. Also, I wanted to jump past all the basics and go directly to advanced theory, which was rather frowned upon by various people, including my teachers."

"That definitely sounds like you."

"Oh, that's me all over."

"But you got through, in the end."

"By the skin of my teeth, yeah. I couldn't let… well, there was this one bloke, sort of a friend at the time. He got higher marks than I did and he kept saying that I wouldn't make it. So, I _had_ to, really. No choice. I suppose that makes me a bit…"

"Competitive?" Rose offered.

"All right, let's go with that," he said, finally pulling back from under the console. "Ah, and here we are – Rose, I need you now, just down here." She squeezed next to him, and they both looked inside, where the Doctor had wedged the capacitor into what seemed to be a very awkward position. "Now, if you could just hold that in place-" He guided her hand to just above the tangle of tubes. "-now, you'll need to push down, as hard as you can… that's perfect, just like that, and I'll be able to calibrate the connection."

He got to his feet and hopped over her to where the screen was. She shifted to a more comfortable position, not sure just how long she'd need to be doing this – hopefully not too long, though, because her fingers were already starting to hurt.

"When the time comes, I'll need you to twist everything you're holding to the left. If I do it all right, it should just click into place." He reached over to flip a couple of switches and then stared intently at the screen for a moment. "It wasn't hard to find?"

"Dead easy," she said. "Mind you, it would have been even simpler if I could read that writing of yours. You need to teach me – it's the only thing in here that doesn't get translated."

"It takes years to learn properly," he said, twisting the glass paperweight-looking bit about.

"Like I said, you need to teach me."

He stopped entirely for a moment, his hand hovering over a button. Then he pressed it decisively. "Right, then. Twist."

She yanked and, as promised, it all turned very easily into place. She grinned up at him and he helped her back to her feet.

"That one's a reminder that the lever on the far left tends to stick," he said, pointing at one of his notes. It was one of those circles with a chuck taken out of it, with a spidery spiraling design winding about in the middle. "But that's starting at the end. What we really need is a children's primer."

"And you just happen to have one on board."

"As a matter of fact, I do," he said. "Oh, Rose, you haven't seen the language library yet, have you? The translation matrix doesn't work in there, so it's _just_ the place to go to learn new languages."

He grabbed her hand and they took off, with him babbling the whole way – he told her how many languages the TARDIS knew ("Trillions."), how long it should take her to pick up the basics ("Most humans, I'd say ten years. Most humans that I've traveled with, maybe five. You, though, you have a knack with everything you touch, so I'm sure you'll pick it up much more quickly."), and how he'd figured out the best way to write her name ("You _could_ go with just the letters, but that's sort of boring, not when there's so much more to work with. And we had this flower that was a bit like a rose, better smell though, but then I had to decide on the _color_ because, with this flower, color is intrinsically linked with the name of it. I only recently realized that yours had to be gold, so that's all settled now and I just need to work in your last name.").

His enthusiasm was as infectious as ever and the walls of the TARDIS seemed to fly by as they raced down hallways, up stairs, and through doors.

"Here it is!" The Doctor dropped her hand so that he could spin about and wave toward the door just ahead. "The Library of Infinite Language. The name's not accurate, of course, but I've been reading my way through it for hundreds of years and still haven't reached the end."

He pulled open the door and gestured for her to enter first.

Slowly, she crossed over the threshold, feeling like she should be holding her breath or something.

She _should_ have been.

She wasn't a big reader, not the way the Doctor was, but this library would have impressed her _mum_, who barely did more than glance through magazines. That's how grand it was.

It was on five levels: three above, connected to the main floor by spiraling staircases, and one below, connected by a great, long straight one. And she couldn't see the end of it – it just seemed to go on forever. Shelf upon shelf of books, from millions upon millions of different cultures. She glanced upward and saw a skylight that went on as long as the ceiling did, and it let in this ever-shifting bluish-purple light that softly radiated over the enormous room, bright enough to read by.

"Apart from us, only two other people have ever been in this room." The Doctor's voice was so sudden that Rose had to stop herself from startling. "It doesn't get as much use as it should. But it is glorious, isn't it?"

"It figures," she said. She glanced over at the Doctor, who was giving her a puzzled look. "This is the biggest room that I've seen yet. And, what with you being _you_, it just figures that it'd be a room of books. And… they're not just any books, but ones that tell you new ways to… to talk to people, to connect. You said once that you knew five billion languages. That's not from the TARDIS, is it? You learned most of those here, in this room. Being in here – it's like what it would be like to see inside your head."

The Doctor's mouth opened, but he didn't say anything, and then he reached out to her, sliding his hand down her arm and twining his fingers around hers. She tightened her fingers in response, giving him a wide smile – his answering smile was just as broad and happy.

Then he led her slowly through the library, pointing out a couple of sections – Earth languages were all on this main level, over on the left, with languages from the rest of her solar system shading outward toward the middle.

They went up two of the staircases and he led her over an archway to a set of bookshelves near a window – a window shining with that same violet glow as the skylight. There was a small reading nook nearby, with two burnt-orange couches, one fluffy-looking chair, and four small tables, one of them with books on it already, and all of them looking like they'd grown out of the floor.

"That one, there," he said, pointing her towards the shelf on the left and then stepping back a bit.

Rose ran her hand along the edge, every title on every book in that twisting, flowing script. It would take years to learn, the Doctor had said, and she believed him. It took ages to learn human languages, too, and those were so much simpler.

She turned towards him to ask which book was the children's one he'd mentioned, and-

He'd been staring at her, at the side of her face, and he colored slightly when he realized that she'd noticed, but he didn't stop looking.

"You've been doing that a lot lately." Rose realized that she was playing with her hair and made herself stop. It was a stupid nervous habit and she didn't have any reason to feel that way around the Doctor, even if he _had_ been staring at her ever since the coronation.

"Sorry." The word was absent, distracted. "It's just… you have a lovely face, Rose."

She could feel herself flushing, heat rising up in her cheeks.

"It was so wrong, to look at your face and see nothing," he said, voice hushed, almost _reverent_, but that sounded silly, even just in her head. "They were all missing: your hazel-brown eyes; those strong, straight eyebrows with that tiny little scar on the left one; that wonderfully-shaped nose of yours – don't think I ever realized what an amazing nose you had until it was gone – and…"

Rose tilted her head slightly as the Doctor came closer, resisting the strange urge she had to back up a little – she'd never let him push her about before and she wasn't going to start now, even if she felt like she might burst from how hard she was blushing.

"… the most ridiculously perfect pair of lips," he finished, almost on a whisper, reaching out to brush over them with the tips of his fingers. "They're lush, boldly-painted and with such a sweet curve to them."

"You- you like my lips," Rose managed, feeling just the slightest bit light-headed.

The Doctor smiled, a tiny smile that drew Rose's attention to _his_ mouth, his own lips parted and a pale, inviting pink. Her mouth fell open in response, and the tips of two of his fingers slipped in, as if he'd been waiting.

"They are quite possibly the most beautiful set that I've ever seen and, well, you have no idea how many people I've run into over the course of my life."

His fingers tasted of mango and salt and he was standing so close to her that she could smell him, that odd musky scent that he'd had before too, that lay under everything else.

"Rose Tyler." His voice was so soft. He pulled his fingertips out of her mouth, cupping her jaw, and the look on his face was so determined, as if he didn't do this now, he'd lose the courage forever. "I'd like to kiss you. That all right?"

She barely managed a nod, what with the words _please_ and _finally_ knocking about so loudly inside her head. She couldn't recall when she had first wanted the Doctor to kiss her, though she'd swear it was before he changed, but right now it felt like she'd wanted it forever.

And then his lips were pressing against hers, a soft and strange surprise.

It wasn't anything like kissing Mickey. Mickey was warm and familiar – she'd kissed him when he tasted sour from morning breath or onions, sweet from candy and pies, salty from chips, pretty much any sort of way a bloke _could_ taste, at least she'd thought.

The Doctor's mouth was cool against hers, his lips slightly parted. He tasted a bit like the fruit they'd been eating a while back, but mostly like clear cool water and nothing else she could describe. She'd known it before, once, when Cassandra had possessed her, but her memory of that time was tiny and squeezed together. This felt like diving into a stream, putting her head under the surface to feel all the rushing froth swirling around, more sensation than taste.

He just… breathed into her mouth for a moment, and she swayed into him, weightless, letting the feeling surge over her and through her.

It was only when he pulled away that she realized she'd closed her eyes. She blinked them open, and he was staring at her again.

"What are you-" But she never finished, because he seemed to realize how tightly he was holding her and she stumbled a bit when he let go. He reached toward her, like he wanted to touch her mouth again, but stopped himself half-way, his hand pressed back against his side.

"That was new, wasn't it? Well… technically, _technically_, it wasn't, but that wasn't you before and the memory would be a bit compressed and that was the only other – yeah, definitely _that_ was the only other time, you agree? Never ever kissed before that, and that was really Cassandra."

He leaned towards her again, his eyes flashing down to her lips.

"Was she a better kisser than me?" Rose asked, pulling away from him. The Doctor paused, looking utterly thrown, but he recovered quickly, tossing a cheeky smile her way.

"Hmm, that's an interesting question. I seem to recall her being a bit more… forceful. Not sure that I can properly compare the two."

"Is that a challenge?"

"Maybe it is."

"Then I accept."

He spread his arms out, offering himself up. "Fine, then. Do your best. Snog the hell out of me."

Instead of straight-out kissing him, she started out with a hug, just a hug like they always did. She waited until he'd relaxed and wrapped his arms around her and then she arched up, pressing her body against his – she could remember the way Cassandra had held his face and she didn't want to copy that, not even a little. _This_ was going to be a Rose Tyler kiss, one-hundred percent.

Rose hadn't kissed that many blokes but she'd done her fair share. Generally, she didn't have to do most of the work, but there'd been exceptions, enough for her to do some improvising.

Her mouth was against the crook of his neck and she parted her lips, sneaking out her tongue to taste him there – there was a faint flavor on his skin, a tang that reminded of her of sweat. It was sort of weird how that tasted the same on the Doctor as it did on Mickey. He jumped a bit in surprise, but didn't let go of her.

"I thought you were going to _kiss_ me," he said, voice strangled.

"Oh, I'm working my way 'round to it."

"Cassandra didn't lick the side of my neck." But he wasn't trying to pull away – in fact, his arms had tightened around her, one of them sliding down to the small of her back, supporting her. "I'm not sure that anyone has _ever_ licked the side of my neck. Even when I was… well, there wasn't any licking of any necks, I can tell you that much."

"Do you like it?"

"Well, I… that's…"

"That's what I thought," she said, leaning back a bit against his arms, glad he was stronger than he looked. She kissed the curve of his jaw, and she saw his eyes flick shut, eyelashes fluttering.

Then, he frowned, just a little.

"Did you do this for Mickey?" he asked. With his eyes still closed and a bit of a pout on his face, he looked absurdly young and terribly uncertain.

"Before I met you, I was with him for nearly five years, on and off, and you think we never did anything but kiss on the mouth?"

"Not even that, anymore," he said with a hint of satisfaction in his voice, his moods as quicksilver as ever.

"You aren't too close for me to smack you," she warned him, but she pressed a kiss against his nose instead.

"Oh, I'm just terrified," he said. And then he paused, opening his eyes and looking quite serious. "Hold on. Five years? Mickey started dating you when you were _fourteen_? And how old was he?"

"Like you've got room to talk," she said, with a bit of a laugh. "Besides, he beat himself up about it as much as you are – he was always so surprised, that first time we were together. Kept saying that my mum would kill him for taking advantage, but he never did. We never slept together until after…"

"After what?"

"I'd sort of run off with this other boy, if you call moving into a flat three streets down 'running off'. He had the most gorgeous blue eyes that I've _ever_ seen – sorry, but it's true."

"Well, I don't have blue eyes anymore, so as long as you think mine are better than Mickey's, I'll survive."

"Yeah," she said. "They are."

"Are they?"

She grinned instead of answering, leaning forward to kiss him while he was looking just that way – all hopeful and nervous. Their first kiss… well, their first _real_ kiss, had been soft and tender. True to her word, she was more assertive this time, her eyes closing as she concentrated on his lower lip, every bit as plush as he'd accused hers of being.

One of his hands was still secure on her back, but he'd moved the other up to her neck, sliding a little into her hair.

It still felt like going underwater, but now she was swimming into the current, teasing his mouth with her tongue and waiting for him to-

His hand tightened against the back of her head, tangling into her hair and he was pushing back now, couldn't help himself – opening his mouth and sucking her upper lip in, just a little. Nine-hundred years, so many different people holding his hand, and he kissed like a man who knew what he was doing, not that she'd expected anything else.

She'd kissed eight blokes in her life, counting the Doctor.

She wondered if he'd ever kissed Sarah Jane.

Oh, his _mouth_. He tilted his head just a bit to the side and then licked his tongue between her lips, the way he licked doors and blood and carbon casings. Was he analyzing her, figuring out what tastes made up Rose Tyler?

She slid one of her hand down the front of his suit, leaning back a bit so she had a bit of room, and started popping open the buttons. The Doctor's hand slipped slightly on her back, and he was touching bare skin now. He had such clever, clever fingers – she'd seen him do amazing things with them, delicate and impossible tasks.

She sighed into his mouth, thinking of what else he might be able to do with them, and the Doctor took a step forward with her, pushing her back toward the bookshelf. They hit it with a small thump as books shifted in place and then he was pulling away from the kiss, leaning his forehead against hers.

"You didn't need to stop," she said, slowly opening her eyes. He was so close to her that she could barely focus, but she found that she didn't mind.

"Didn't I? I know humans, Rose," the Doctor said, stroking a hand through her hair. "Once you lot start at kissing, it's hard-pressed to stop you and before you know it, the whole day has gone."

"And that's a bad thing?" she asked. "You seemed to be having fun."

"Mmm, yes," he agreed, twisting to press a lazy kiss below her ear. "But we had a plan."

"Did we?"

"_You_ are going to start to learn Gallifreyan," he said, reaching past her to pull a book from the shelf. "That's the name of… my planet was called Gallifrey. I'm sure I've mentioned it before."

He hadn't.

"Well, if you really want me to start learning, you might want to back up just a bit," she said. He glanced down and then looked slightly startled, like he truly hadn't realized he was still holding her up tight against the bookshelf.

He backed away, book in hand, and Rose followed him, only slightly disappointed – kissing was all well and good, but she'd never pass up the chance to get to know the Doctor better. And she had the feeling that there would be plenty of time for more kissing in the future.

He settled into one of the couches and she plopped down next to him, pulling her legs up underneath her and leaning over him a bit. He opened the book up at the beginning and put one arm around her, shifting her closer to him, so that she was sitting half on him.

"Gallifreyan isn't quite as complicated as it looks," he said. "But it's harder than English. We'll just do a basic run-through of some standard lettering and then you'll probably want to stop for tea."

"I'm not the one who always ends up eating all the cakes," Rose muttered.

"After that, we could have another lesson or we could go ahead and turn on the flux capacitor and see if it's hooked in right."

"What happens if we don't?" Rose asked.

"What do you mean?"

"What would happen if you flew the TARDIS without using it?"

"Our flight would be unstable. I wouldn't be able to predict the landing."

"Blind flying? Have you ever done that before?"

"Oh, I had a randomizer attached for a bit, when I was trying to escape… notice. It was rather fun, actually."

"Maybe we could do that, for just a trip or two," Rose suggested, laying her head against his shoulder. "We might end up somewhere that we'd never have thought to go on our own."

His arm around her tightened, just a bit, and she felt him press his lips against the top of her head.

"I think that sounds like a _brilliant_ idea," he said. "Entirely new territory – once I'd have thought it didn't exist anymore, but you've proven me wrong so many times."

"There's always something new," she told him, and then she twisted and turned until she got to a place where she could comfortably slide her hand over his, with his arm wrapped about her and the book open on their laps. "Come on, then, Doctor, teach me this language of yours. Teach me Gallifreyan."

He nodded, looking solemn, and then started talking and she could hear, under each word, a fierce and deep happiness. She rested her head against his shoulder, stared down at the book and listened. She'd hated school and had been bored with nearly all of her teachers and their droning voices, but the Doctor spoke with such passion and care that all she ever wanted to do was learn more.

Luckily, with the Doctor, there was always more to know.


End file.
